


Because you said I could not sing...

by PrairieDawn



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Continuity Fixit, Episode: s01e10 Dagger of the Mind, Gen, Missing Scenes, Reasonably Canon-compliant, The violence is not really that graphic, Vulcan Mind Melds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 17:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13506435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: In which I take advantage of the disjointed scene changes in Dagger of the Mind to add some stuff to clarify Spock's motivations and explain why his melding technique changes radically over the course of the first two seasons.  Because I'm a continuity nerd.





	Because you said I could not sing...

**Author's Note:**

> This is a heavily edited repost of a fic I put up several months ago and took down almost immediately because I was sure it was awful. It wasn't that awful, but it did need a lot of work.

Something was terribly wrong on Tantalus, and Doctor Simon Van Gelder seemed to be the key to finding out what it was. He had been restrained and confined in Sickbay for hours, his ravings hinting at sinister goings on at the rehab colony, but unable to be translated into anything that could be acted upon.

The Captain, brashly impulsive as usual, had decided that visiting the surface himself was the best plan of action. Upon hearing he had done so, Van Gelder’s agitation had become, if that were possible, even more severe. It was as if his desperation was getting in the way of his ability to impart the very information he was so desperate to provide. Spock remained in Sickbay with the doctor, more than a little worried for the human physician’s safety. The panic born of insanity often granted superhuman strength and Van Gelder was already bigger than McCoy.

According to the staff on the planet, Van Gelder had injured himself accidentally using a neural neutralizer device, the specifications of which they had been conveniently unable to find on request. Kirk’s transmissions unfortunately reached sickbay in Van Gelder’s earshot, and the discovery that Kirk planned to spend the night planetside had sent the man into a frenzy.

“No!” Van Gelder thrashed in his restraints hard enough to raise bruises. “No. No, don't let them! You must warn your captain,” he cried. He strained toward first Spock, then McCoy, the veins on his neck standing out alarmingly. “Don't let him stay! Don't let him stay! Don't!” McCoy started forward, a hypospray full of tranquilizer in hand. Seeing him, Van Gelder took control of himself, his hands balled up into fists, his breath hissing through clenched teeth. “No. No. Don't hypo me. Please, don't hypo me.” He schooled his body to lie still, if rigid, on the bed. “I'll try not to fight. I'll try. But you must listen. Warn your Captain. Doctor Adams. Doc, Doctor Adams will destroy.”

Spock stood at the side of the biobed opposite Van Gelder. “Destroy how? What?” 

“Right death.” Van Gelder said, then closed his eyes. What could right death mean? He wondered if it were a cultural reference familiar to humans that he was missing, or if Van Gelder’s words were merely gibberish. Van Gelder remained quiet, still but rigid, for a couple of minutes, while McCoy stood nearby, the hypospray out of sight but close at hand. Spock remained on the other side of the biobed in case he needed assistance restraining the brain damaged man. 

When Van Gelder opened his eyes again, they were clear and focused, for the moment. “I am sorry, doctor,” he said to McCoy. “I assure you I am trying.”

Van Gelder closed his eyes again briefly and licked his lips, almost as if he were trying to collect himself, or perhaps to find a way to say what he wanted to say without triggering whatever it was drove the sense from his mind. He opened his eyes and fixed them, almost apologetically, on Spock. Not on McCoy, but on Spock. “Help me. Help me remember. I need to warn…” He negated that thought with a head shake, his face ruddy and twisted with pain. “Join your mind with mine. I am not strong enough to fight this...alone. I know you can help me.” He paused again, struggling against himself. “Please.”

Spock took a step back, stumbling in his haste. Vulcan touch telepathy was not discussed with offworlders. How did Van Gelder even know about it? No question, he would not, could not meld with a human. Much less a total stranger. It would be inappropriate under ideal circumstances, but for Spock to even try would be the height of audacity. He smoothed the emotion out of his face, hoping his distress had not been obvious, but McCoy was already staring at him. “I would take what Van Gelder just said as the ramblings of a madman, but your response suggests otherwise. Is he on to something, Spock?”

He considered a lie. Van Gelder was not a reliable source of information in his current state, so McCoy would probably believe Spock, or at least pretend to believe him until he had time to dig more thoroughly into Vulcan neurophysiology, which he would do as soon as he had a free moment, knowing the doctor. Once he had, McCoy would likely never trust his veracity again. To lie would be both illogical and cowardly. “The technique does exist. I am uncertain as to whether it would be helpful in this circumstance.” 

McCoy grumbled, “Hell of a thing to leave out of your personnel file. Or at least your medical file. Telepathic ability makes you vulnerable to injuries other people don’t suffer.”

“Doctor, I hardly think this is the time to lecture me about my medical records.”

“Right.” The doctor turned away to pace the room, while Spock leaned on the table and composed a log entry in his head, not that he had time to actually record such an entry if the Captain were truly in danger. McCoy turned back to him. “Spock, if there’s the slightest possibility that it might help.”

What was he supposed to say that would not expose him? He settled for a half-truth. “I’ve never used it on a human, Doctor.” Or anyone else, for that matter.

“If there’s any way we can look into this man’s mind to see if what he’s seeing is real or delusion,” McCoy began.

Spock interrupted, “It’s a hidden, personal thing to the Vulcan people, part of our private lives.” An ugly part of him asked by what right he used the word ‘our,’ at least in this context. His childhood instructor had made it quite clear that his half human mind was objectionable, too intrinsically flawed for any but the minimum contacts necessary to incorporate him, however grudgingly, into Vulcan society. Since then, he had never asked to touch his parents’ minds, nor had he formed any sufficiently close friendships as a schoolboy to have sought an opportunity there. He buried himself in study and put his energy into avoiding bullies and impressing teachers who assumed that he wasn’t intelligent enough to be a real Vulcan either.  
McCoy had to press the issue. “Now look, Spock, Jim Kirk could be in real trouble. Will it work or not?”

There was another, more reckless part of him that wondered whether he could successfully reach another mind with his own. It wasn’t that he lacked raw talent. He was higher field than either of his parents, and his slightly humanized neurophysiology rendered him immune to Pa’nar syndrome, a fact that probably should have earmarked him for First Contact training. If he had chosen to accept a position at the VSA, that might have even been an option for him.

In retrospect, he had to admit that his self imposed isolation had been more a matter of adolescent sulking than any real need to remain aloof. But it was a little late for regrets. The fact remained that his training had ended abruptly, shortly after his seventh birthday, and his barely trained, unpracticed mind could only damage Van Gelder further. It would be wrong for him to put one man at risk on the off chance that it might save another from a similar fate, even if that other was his captain.

And yet, Van Gelder had volunteered. More than that, he had reached out to him for help. If he left Van Gelder to struggle alone through such torment when the man had begged for his help, what kind of person would he be? It would be like standing by and watching someone drown. 

“It could be dangerous,” he said, but only to Van Gelder, because if he had to explain exactly how and why it might be dangerous and wait for McCoy to figure out what to do to mitigate that danger, they could be here all night. “Do you understand?” Van Gelder’s roving eyes focused on his face and he nodded, just slightly. “It requires I make pressure changes to your nerves, your blood vessels.” Given that Van Gelder’s red face already looked about half a breath away from a stroke, he was glad McCoy was there to assist should something go badly amiss.

Van Gelder swallowed, apparently afraid Spock was going to back out after all. “You must open my mind. Let me warn you and explain to you.” He sucked in one deep breath, then slowly released it.

“This will not affect you, Doctor McCoy, only the person I touch. It is not hypnosis.” Spock took a steadying breath of his own and let go his carefully constructed mental shields, something he had not done in so long that the sudden rush of emotion, Van Gelder’s deep pain and despair, shot with a desperate hope, and, more distantly, curiosity and concern from the doctor, caught him by surprise. Van Gelder lay quietly, fists still clenched at his sides, breathing slowly and evenly, apparently attempting a simple meditative technique accessible to and common even among humans.

Had Van Gelder been Vulcan, it would at least have been clear where the psi points ought to be. As it was, he grasped the older man’s face firmly, hoping that his hands would make contact with some usable telepathic conduit. The connection from his end sharpened immediately. He was flooded with Van Gelder’s terror and agony, his mind an open wound. Spock’s years of careful control threatened to shatter under its weight. Vulcans built layers of logic and control over their emotions. Humans were immersed in emotion, rivers of emotion, torrents...and yet, for all that Spock struggled, the contact was not yet strong or clear enough to be two way. As far as he could tell, Van Gelder felt nothing.

Lacking a better plan, he shifted position, his fingers brushing the trigeminal ganglion at the temple. He was rewarded with darkening vision and a vertigo that was almost sickening in its intensity. He fought against it, involuntarily, for a fraction of a second before forcing himself to shift his attention toward Van Gelder’s mind, rather than away. Spock focused on becoming stillness, gathering Van Gelder’s terror and making it his own to quell. He knew how to master his own fear, he reminded himself. This should be no different. Finally, Van Gelder’s mind acknowledged his with surprise, then hope and gratitude.

McCoy said something, but he ignored it. If it were important, the doctor could handle it himself. Spock spoke aloud, uncertain what to say, but wanting to validate what Van Gelder felt, to call his attention to it so that the connection between them could be deepened further. “You feel a strange euphoria…” Those were not his words. He was repeating Van Gelder’s thought back to him. That was probably a good sign. “Your body floats.” His own body certainly floated. He thought he might fall, and so bent to brace himself against the biobed.

Then his own body became something of an afterthought, and he was no longer aware which thoughts reached his voice, or with any certainty which thoughts were his. There was something dance like about the way the two of them shifted the patterns of their thoughts to match and blend. Van Gelder tried to access the thoughts and memories bound from him and was driven back by pain at every attempt. Spock deepened the contact each time, offering his own mental discipline to hold the pain at bay, but it was never quite enough to reach into the memories they needed. They reached a discontinuity and lit on its edge. Spock paused to call up the memory of his bonding, not for its significance, but for the precise sensation, the mental shift T’Pau had guided the children T’Pring and Spock into achieving. Van Gelder acknowledged the memory and followed Spock down. After a moment, they ceased to be two in communion, but were instead something in between one person and two, not quite a single being, but an interdependent “we”.

The implanted pain still existed in their mind, but it could be beaten. The memories behind it were shattered fragments. Enough could be seen to verify that Van Gelder was tricked by Dr. Adams into testing the neural neutralizer device, then his mind forcibly emptied, but the details were fragments shot with desperate loneliness, swirling red and black in their mind. This was not ordinary loneliness, the loneliness of lost friendships, of rejection, the loneliness of being lost in space with no ship to come to one’s rescue. This was a blank, infant loneliness, of crying in the dark, of not even knowing that there is such a thing as another being. That emptiness, being unable to find identity, volition, memory, created a desperation that Adams had exploited without mercy.

The loneliness and brokenness of the Van Gelder part of them resonated with the loneliness the Spock part of them had so recently called to mind. They were, for a period of time they were unable to precisely measure, trapped beneath it, as though loneliness were itself an oppressive physical weight. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the weight lightened. Patterns both felt and seen swirled around them, representing memory and thought. They ordered themselves, rebuilding the broken connections in one mind off the healthier template. Once they were aware what was happening, they found, with a little experimentation, that they could encourage the process. The Van Gelder part of them wondered if he would think more like a Vulcan than he had before, and the Spock part of them had to concede ignorance.

They became aware of an intense weariness. If they did not separate, the more fragile of them might begin to suffer harm. They could not remember what it was like to be singular, how to tease one self apart from the other. The Van Gelder part reacted with surpriseat that admission, which actually helped...they interacted as two, not one. Heartbeat and breathing, Spock remembered. He could find his himself through his body’s rhythms, draw away, allow their thoughts to become asynchronous and fall apart. He presented the thought to Van Gelder, and the other followed suit, perhaps more clumsily. “I am Spock,” he said, aloud. Repeated it, twice. Could hear another voice near him say, “I am Simon.”

Spock stepped away from the biobed, blinking to clear his vision. McCoy stepped forward to run a tricorder over Van Gelder’s resting form, then readied a hypospray. “Well,” he said. “His blood sugar is low, his blood pressure’s a bit high, but otherwise he looks better. Much better. This is just glucose,” he told Van Gelder, pressing the hypospray to his arm.

McCoy stepped around the biobed and approached Spock, but came only close enough to run a tricorder over him. “Your blood glucose looks pretty low, too.” He checked the readings again, then poured a drink of something yellow and set it beside Spock. “Drink this. I’d hand it to you, but I’m guessing physical contact would be a bad idea about now.”

“Thank you, and yes,” Spock replied. He drained the glass in one gulp. “How long?”

“Just under fifteen minutes.” McCoy refilled the glass. “I heard enough to know Adams is a piece of work, and Kirk’s in trouble, but I didn’t catch the details. You two were pretty much spouting word salad.”

“Have you tried to contact the captain?”

“Of course. Nothing yet.”

Spock finished the second cup of cloying liquid and managed to set the cup down without his hand shaking this time. “I’m going to beam down to the surface.”

McCoy peered suspiciously at him. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

The words, “Of course I’m alright,” almost reached his lips. Echoes, he supposed. Instead, he said, “I am well enough. The captain is in grave danger.” He ran out of sickbay as quickly as he dared.

Events left him little time to reflect on the experience itself. The information gained was all that mattered. Spock paced the transporter room. “Try Emergency channel B.”

The transporter tech tapped a few buttons and a shrill whistle filled the room. “I’m sorry sir. Trying C.”

Again, a painfully shrill whistle. Again, no response. Spock restrained himself from striking the console in frustration. He forced himself to stand calmly. “Emergency channel D.”

Berkeley shook his head. “It’s no good, Mr. Spock. I can’t break through their force field.”

“Keep trying,” Spock replied unnecessarily. There was nothing more he could do. The lack of response from Kirk fueled his worst expectations. Would they retrieve a captain as damaged and emptied as Van Gelder had been? He hoped not. It had appeared to him that Van Gelder had been subjected to the device for hours at a time, many times over a period of weeks. Kirk had only been down on the planet’s surface for a few hours. 

The doctor stood beside him, echoing his own restlessness in the small sounds of shifting weight and tapping fingers and fizzing mental static. He tightened his shields around himself, not having recognized how haphazardly he had thrown them back up in sickbay.

Berkeley interrupted his reverie. “Mister Spock, the force field is gone. I can send you right to the source of the interruption.”

He nodded his thanks to the tech and turned to McCoy. “Get some security people and follow me down.” He stepped up onto the transporter pad. “Energise.”

Spock found himself in a cramped room full of electrical equipment. A body lay on the floor, obviously dead. If the silence didn’t tell him so, the burns would have. He searched the room briefly and found a control panel. One of those buttons had to control the forcefield, and he did not particularly care what the other buttons did. He pushed them all. Given that the main power switch would also control life support, power to the rehab colony would need to be restored and soon. He grabbed the bar that controlled power for the station and pulled, hard. The lights came back on.

Spock sprinted through the rehab colony, but McCoy’s team had the advantage of numbers and luck, and found Kirk first. “We have him,” McCoy reported over the comlink. “He’s...well enough,” the doctor said. Spock was not encouraged by his tone.

The hours of documentary mopping up at the rehab colony fell to Spock, since the Captain was being checked out in sickbay. “Checked out in sickbay” was McCoy’s way of being vague, and Spock worried that the phrase was code for Kirk being seriously injured. Finally, he was free to return to the Enterprise. He hurried to sickbay, fearing he would find his captain shattered and raving like Van Gelder had been, and half preparing for a repeat performance. He quashed the embryo of a thought that he might not object to a meld with the captain all that much with the thought that logically, he would object to the captain being in such poor condition that it would be necessary. 

Van Gelder was up and around, wearing a borrowed blue medical uniform and a ponytail. The Captain was sitting up on a biobed, conversing urgently with him about Dr. Noel. McCoy stopped Spock just inside the door and firmly escorted him out, saying, “Go. Eat, meditate, whatever you need to do. We’ve got this.”

Spock opened his mouth to object, but swallowed his words and returned to his quarters to follow the doctor’s orders. Once there, he found he was exceptionally hungry. He finished one meal, only to replicate and consume a second. After cleaning up, he donned his meditation robes, lit one of the nonregulation candles his superior officers were kind enough to overlook, and attempted to order his thoughts in meditation. There was much to consider, and he was uncertain in what sequence he should address it all.

He was, of course, mentally unsettled. Flashes of memory like snapshots of another life passed before his closed eyes, snatches of conversation and music that had no relation to his own experience interrupted his orderly thought patterns. He identified and dismissed each of them, save a few bars of music he set aside to seek out later in the ship’s databanks. The melody was interesting, and he felt he wished to keep some memento with which to remember Van Gelder, despite being unsure if such an impulse was quite appropriate. When he contemplated the meld in its particulars, he found the emotions associated with the experience were surprisingly positive.

That was puzzling. Van Gelder’s experience in the neural neutralizer itself had been a nightmare. The echoes of it ached in his mind. So where was this unfathomable sense of joy coming from? And joy was the right word. It was not fascination, as such, nor quite pride or pleasure. It was not so unlike the sense of rightness he experienced when he and the Captain solved some difficult puzzle or averted a crisis together. It was not entering into the darkness, but finding the light within and beyond it, weaving wholeness out of brokenness in cooperation with another.

And yet, he remained troubled for reasons he could not quite bring to mind. A memory surfaced, along with a name. Layang Ain. Why would she trouble him now? He remembered her as a human he had believed at the time to be the strongest he had ever met, a geologist who could keep up with him on long hikes in hilly country, precise in her data collection techniques and focused in even the most difficult situations. They were in the same year at the Academy, assigned to the same ship, and frequently went on missions together, but she had been involved in the first real tragedy Spock had encountered in his Starfleet career.

They were part of a team of six sent to study some unusual geochemistry in the caves of a planet being surveyed as a potential source of rare earth metals. Spock and the Lieutenant in charge of the science team had remained with the shuttlecraft to set up some bulky monitoring equipment, while Layang and three others had gone into the caves to map and take readings. They missed a check in, and then a second. Lieutenant Barrie, who at first had dismissed their tardiness as passage through spaces where the comm signals were blocked by mineral deposits, became concerned enough to search for them.

They locked down their equipment and set a brisk pace toward the caves, only to be met by a disheveled and sobbing Layang. She had fought them at first. It had taken both Spock and the Lieutenant to subdue her. She alternated from mumbling apologies and begging for help to raving about monsters in the caves, and in her disorientation had been unable to relate to him or the Lieutenant where the team had gotten into trouble. Finally, they had called for a beam out and continued the search on their own. It took four hours and two more search parties to find the rest of the team, and by then the hallucinogenic gases in the cave had taken their toll. It appeared from the grotesque scene that the other three members of the team had torn each other apart.

He remembered the contempt he had felt for Layang from then on, and the fact that he had made no secret of it to her. She had been weak minded, too weak to break free of the hallucinations to tell them where to find the rest of the team, and he blamed her for their deaths. The loss of his regard, he believed, had contributed to her resignation from Starfleet not long after.

The intervening decade had taught him better. Layang had not been weak, but had been the strongest member of the team. She had managed to escape the cave and run over a mile to find him and the Lieutenant, all while suffering vivid, violent hallucinations. Her strength alone had just been insufficient to save the rest of her team. What he hadn’t considered until today was that he might have been partially responsible as well. It wasn’t so much that he had chosen not to suggest melding with her as that it had simply not occurred to him at all. He had a tool in his toolbox that he had failed to acknowledge for so long that he had forgotten it existed, and because of that, three people had died and another’s promising career was ruined. What had happened, had happened. He could not change the past. But he could resolve not to make the same mistake again.

He next saw Simon Van Gelder as the doctor was leaving to return to Tantalus. McCoy checked the crates of supplies one final time and shook Van Gelder’s hand. “Are you sure you want to go back there?”

Van Gelder nodded firmly. “I will be needed to help the patients recover from Dr. Adams’ abuse.”

McCoy nodded. “And how’s your memory?”  
“I still have blank spaces. Drug names, recognizing faces. I can’t remember where I went on my last vacation. But I feel like I’m me again.” He turned to Spock. “I know the risk you took. Thank you.”

“One does not thank logic,” he replied.

Simon Van Gelder stepped onto the transporter platform and vanished.

Spock turned to McCoy. “He is still not fully recovered.”

“No,” McCoy agreed. “But he is better. Sometimes that’s all we get to do, patch them up and pass them on.”

Spock’s eyebrow rose of its own accord. We. He supposed it might have been a slip of the tongue, but it was a telling slip, regardless. He felt, just slightly, as if he had been invited into McCoy’s circle. He was no doctor, but the instructor who had shamed him into decades of solitude was wrong. He was not objectionable, and he was not broken. Just this once, he had been a healer.

**Author's Note:**

> I do so like comments, and I answer just about all of them. My name is also Prairiedawn on tumblr in case you need to tell me I messed something up and you don't want to do it in a comment, or if you want to gush about how great TOS is...


End file.
